Case study · Business Analytics
Decide first, then chart
Most dashboards fail because they were built from the data that happened to exist rather than from the decision they were meant to support.
PulseBoard
Business Analytics · 5–10 days · ₹8,000–₹25,000
Go and use the buildStart from the decision, not the data
The first question is not 'what data do you have' but 'what do you keep having to decide without knowing'.
Comparison is built into every number
Revenue of ₹8.4 lakh means nothing on its own.
The situation
What goes wrong here
The spreadsheet is not usually the problem. The problem is that answering 'is this month actually good' takes forty minutes of filtering and a pivot table, so it gets done once a quarter instead of once a week — and decisions get made on the feeling of being busy.
The standard response is a dashboard with thirty charts, which fails differently: it is impressive on delivery day, opened twice, and abandoned. Thirty charts is not an answer, it is a second dataset to interpret.
The decisions
Every one of these had a cost
A decision with no trade-off is a feature list. Each of these names what was given up, because that is the part a client needs to agree with before the project starts — not after.
- 01
Start from the decision, not the data
The first question is not 'what data do you have' but 'what do you keep having to decide without knowing'. For a seller that is usually: what should I stock more of, which region deserves attention, and is this month genuinely better than last. Four KPIs and three breakdowns settle all three. Everything that did not survive that question was left out.
What it cost
Someone always wants the chart that got cut. Adding it later takes an hour; recovering a dashboard nobody opens takes a rebuild.
- 02
Comparison is built into every number
Revenue of ₹8.4 lakh means nothing on its own. Against last month, it means something. Every KPI carries its change, so the dashboard answers 'is this good' rather than 'what is this' — which is the actual question.
What it cost
It needs at least one prior period of clean history before the dashboard is useful, which occasionally means a data-tidying step nobody budgeted for.
- 03
One time-range control, applied to everything
Month, quarter and year switch the entire view at once. Per-chart filters are how a viewer ends up comparing this month's revenue against last year's regions without noticing.
What it cost
Less flexibility for a power user, who can go to the underlying data. The dashboard is for the owner, and it should be impossible to misread.
In the build
- Four headline KPIs, each with period-on-period change
- Monthly revenue trend
- Top products by volume
- Regional split
- One time-range control for the whole view
- Scheduled refresh from the source export
Built with
- Power BI
- Excel
- SQL
You provide
- A sales or accounting export
- The decisions you keep having to make without good numbers
- Access to the data source for scheduled refresh
Nothing starts until the scope, timeline and price are agreed in writing.
Measured
How this build actually performs
Taken from the finished build under throttled conditions, not from a score card. All six concept builds share a foundation, so they share these numbers.
Chromium at 412×915, 4× CPU throttling, 1.6 Mbps with 150 ms latency, cold cache — a mid-range Android phone on a typical Indian mobile network, not a developer's laptop. Includes the analytics the live site loads. Measured 2026-09-08.
- Largest contentful paint
- 1.58–2.16s
- When the main content is actually on screen. Google treats anything under 2.5s as good.
- Cumulative layout shift
- 0
- Nothing moves after it appears — no mis-taps caused by a button jumping.
- JavaScript over the wire
- 429 kB
- Compressed, as actually sent — 259 kB of site code plus 170 kB of Google Analytics.
- Total page weight
- ~613 kB
- Everything: markup, styles, fonts, scripts and analytics.
Honestly
What this is and isn’t
The interactive demo on this site is a web rebuild of the dashboard layout with invented figures, so it can be explored in a browser without a Power BI licence or a login. Delivered work in this category is normally built in Power BI against the client's real export. The layout, the KPI choices and the single-control interaction are exactly what gets delivered; the technology behind the demo is not.